


water if god wills it

by baliset



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, I'm not sorry, also a fic in which silvaire is straight up a gunslinger from the dark tower, it's tillman incineration fic time baby, the crabs are a ka-tet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:09:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26899468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baliset/pseuds/baliset
Summary: The first time Tillman meets Silvaire Roadhouse, it’s at a post-season party at Loser’s Charles Village townhome. The first thing she says to him is “You’re not a very good pitcher, huh?”(or: silvaire roadhouse is a gunslinger, tillman henderson is a shitty pitcher, and ka is a wheel.)
Relationships: Tillman Henderson & Silvaire Roadhouse
Comments: 6
Kudos: 33





	water if god wills it

The first time Tillman meets Silvaire Roadhouse, it’s at a post-season party at Loser’s Charles Village townhome. The first thing she says to him is “You’re not a very good pitcher, huh?”

“Hey, we’re in fucking mourning here,” Tillman says, although the party is practically a rager at this point, and nobody really _looks_ like they’re mourning. That’s how the Crabs do things, though. You go out every day on the field, and maybe someone dies, but you still celebrate. Crack a bottle for Combs, crack a bottle for Nora, and dance the night away anyway because you’re still here to do it.

It’s probably what Combs would have wanted, anyway. The little Tupperware container with their ashes in it sits proudly on the mantle of Loser’s bricked-up fireplace, and it’s been there since the game they died in, because nobody else really wants to take it. Everyone has a copy of Loser’s house key by now, though, and at some point, the Crabs started leaving seashells on top of Combs’s Tupperware whenever they came to visit. The lid of the container is littered with them now, some of them spilling over onto the rest of the mantle, gathering dust.

“You’ve been playing the same since Season 1,” Silvaire says, leaning back against the side of the staircase. “You’ve got no excuse.”

“Well - who invited you, anyway?” Tillman asks. 

It’s a legitimate question. He’s pretty sure Silvaire has never turned up to one of these parties before, and he’s even more sure he would have noticed if she had. She’s tall, probably over six feet, with dark skin and black hair that waves over her eyes and curls unevenly around her jaw, like she cuts it with a pair of kitchen scissors. Her clothes look like a Halloween costume. Wide-brimmed hat, high-waisted pants with boots that come up to the knee, and a white shirt that sits open and unbuttoned to Silvaire’s sternum, exposing the bird skull that she has on a long, silver chain around her neck. Tillman is so distracted by the choice of jewelry that he almost doesn’t notice the fucking _gun_ holstered at her hip.

Silvaire shrugs. “I live here.”

“I’m sorry,” Tillman says, “you _live_ here?”

“Did I stutter?” she asks, and looks down at him coolly through her eyelashes for a long moment before the mask breaks and she laughs. “No, I’m fucking with you. Kennedy lets me sleep in the spare room sometimes.”

“And the rest of the time, you...what, ride around on a horse with no name?”

“Mm,” Silvaire hums, still grinning. “I haven’t ridden a horse in a long time. Not many horses in Baltimore.”

Silvaire is weird, Tillman decides. _Very_ weird. Not blaseball-weird, mind you, but there’s a sort of ambient strangeness about her that isn’t just the outfit. She feels like she walked out of a sepia-toned photograph, or off the set of an old Western, and right into Loser’s living room.

“So, what, you think being Loser’s friend lets you come in here and say I’m a shitty pitcher?” he asks, because yeah, he’s still a little annoyed about it. Nobody tells Tillman Henderson to his face that he sucks, except for pretty much every member of the Crabs and some of the Firefighters.

Silvaire studies him for a long moment, then says, “You don’t aim right.”

“Bullshit I don’t aim right. Do you even watch the games?”

“You aim with your hand,” Silvaire says. Her hands move at her sides, and one of them is clasped around Tillman’s wrist suddenly, before he has time to blink. Some of his Natty Boh sloshes over the rim of the can and drips down his fingers.

“I come to the games,” Silvaire says, conversationally. Her hand stays around his wrist, not squeezing hard enough to hurt, but strong enough that Tillman knows he couldn’t break free if he tried. “I like blaseball. We don’t have it, where I’m from. There’s kids’ games, you know, hit-a-ball-with-a-paddle, but it’s not as complicated.”

“Where do you _come from_ , the 1800s?” Tillman asks, because he can’t let the opportunity pass him by. “The Oregon Trail and shit? The Pony Express? Fucking _Westworld_?”

Silvaire’s grip on his wrist tightens, and he shuts up. Which is not a thing that most people can make Tillman Henderson do, mind you, but he might be a _little_ intimidated (not that he’d ever admit it). Silvaire’s hand is work-calloused, and this close, Tillman can see that she’s missing half of her ring and pinky fingers, snipped off neatly just above the second knuckle.

“You should aim with your eye,” Silvaire says, grinning, and finally lets him go.

Tillman snorts. “Oh, okay, let me just start aiming with my _eye_. What the fuck does that even mean?”

“Gunslinger creed.” Silvaire grabs a beer she’s apparently been keeping behind her, rescuing it from being caught underfoot as someone goes thundering up the stairs.

Tillman’s gaze slides down to the gun holstered at Silvaire’s waist, and the heavy sandalwood grip of it.

“Alright, so show me,” he says. “If you know how to aim so good -”

Silvaire does the thing again, where she moves before he can process it. There’s a flash, and a booming thunderclap noise, and the smell of smoldering gunpowder. The whole party goes silent - for a second, Tillman looks around and wonders if he’s dead, if Silvaire just decided to shoot him to make him stop talking. It wouldn’t be the first time.

He’s not dead, though. His ears are ringing, but he’s still in one piece. Tillman looks for where the bullet went, finds it all the way on the other side of the living room, lodged perfectly in the space where someone has cracked the window open just an inch to let some air in. Like someone wedged it there to prop the frame.

“What the fuck,” Tillman says, maybe too loud.

“Silvaire, not in the house!” Loser calls from across the room.

Silvaire shrugs, and doesn’t apologize. Her gun is already holstered - Tillman doesn’t even think he saw her draw it in the first place.

“Like I said,” she says, “aim with your eye.”

“That ruled,” Tillman says, still too loud, talking over the tinnitus. He can feel his face get hot, knows he’s flushed with excitement and drunkenness, can’t really bring himself to care. “You know that ruled, right? Like, holy _shit_ that ruled.”

“I try to stay humble,” Silvaire demures, but as she pushes her hair back from her face, Tillman can tell she’s trying not to look self-satisfied. Her lips are twitching at the corners, holding back a grin.

“Can you teach me to do that?” Tillman asks.

Silvaire _does_ grin, now, and knocks back the rest of her beer before holding the empty bottle out to him.

“Get me another and we’ll see,” she says.

*

Silvaire teaches him, sort of, but Tillman doesn’t get it until Season 5.

He’s a batter now, and it comes to him easier than pitching did. He’s _fast_ , too. He can hit the ball about six times out of ten, sure, but the running is where he immediately excels, sprinting the bases almost as fast as Forrest, stealing everything he can.

The Crabs are up against the Spies, already winning, when it finally clicks.

Tillman is at bat. The bases are loaded, two outs on the board. They don’t _need_ another run, but if he can do this, if he can bat even one person in…

Denzel Scott throws the pitch, and Tillman breathes in deep, and time seems to slow down.

He sees the ball coming for him - in fact, the ball is the _only_ thing he sees, his vision narrowed in on it like he’s holding it in a crosshair. Everything else fades away. The noise of the crowd goes silent in his ears, and the ball gets closer, closer, closer.

Tillman feels the rhythm of his breath coming up from his stomach. His feet are planted, cleats digging into the dirt. The ball is almost on top of him. His hands move without being told, the bat swinging as an extension of his body. He has just enough time to wonder if the action is as fast as Silvaire drawing her revolver.

There’s a crack like a gunshot, and Tillman’s bat splinters a good hand’s width from the tip, where the ball struck it.

The crowd erupts. Tillman blinks the shadows away from his eyes, looks for the ball, doesn’t find it. It’s gone. Over the fence. Grand slam.

He sees Silvaire in the stands as the Crabs run in to home. She waves.

*

“You care about the Crabs,” Silvaire says one day, during their weekly beer-and-pool-and-bitch session, and it’s a statement, not a question.

“As if,” Tillman says, instinctually. He checks over his shoulder before he says it, though, like any of his teammates would really be in the middle of the Arundel Mills Dave and Buster’s on a Monday afternoon. It’s only two days after their Season 8 victory parade, too, and he bets a bunch of them are still hung over. Good thing they have a whole year’s siesta to recover. 

“We have this thing, where I’m from,” Silvaire says. She leans over the pool table, bird skull dangling down onto the green fabric, and calmly sinks two balls into the corner pocket. “Called a ka-tet.”

Silvaire has mentioned ka before. She says weird shit sometimes, about the place she’s from, and Tillman doesn’t bother questioning it anymore. Everyone he knows says weird shit pretty much constantly. He still gets the feeling that Silvaire isn’t blaseball-weird, that she’s a special flavor of _something_ from a different place or time, but she’s also his friend, and he can take the information as she chooses to dole it out.

“Okay,” Tillman says, and walks around the other side of the pool table to take a shot. The ball he’s aiming for doesn’t quite make it into the pocket, and he pretends not to see it, grabbing for his beer.

“It’s like a family,” Silvaire says. She takes a drink of her own beer before sinking another ball into the corner pocket.

Tillman snorts. “The Crabs _aren’t_ my family.”

“Not your blood family.” Silvaire shrugs. “A ka-tet is a collective, sort of. People brought together by fate, by _ka_ , for a purpose. Your team’s purpose is to get stronger together, and ascend. Right?”

“And fight gods,” Tillman adds, though everyone’s trying to do that these days, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

“Then you’ve got a lot of purpose,” Silvaire says.

Tillman considers it. He moves around the table again, and finally sinks the ball he was shooting at before, though he scratches, and the cue ball sinks with it. He peels himself away from the pool table, leaning on his cue.

A part of him - a big part - doesn’t want to admit that Silvaire has him pegged. He spends more time with the Crabs than he does with his own family. He likes to say he’s above all the blaseball drama, all the god-killing stuff, and mostly that’s _true_ , but when he’s with the Crabs he feels like he’s part of something. Like they’re smoothly interlocking parts of a machine, everyone exactly where they should be. Even Tot and Luis - Tillman misses Ollie, sure, but it’s like Luis came to the team and immediately _fit_ , like they were always meant to be exactly here. Like fate, or destiny, or ka, or the Olde One, or whatever, was just waiting for them to come to Baltimore and take a place reserved for them.

“Do you have one?” Tillman asks. “A ka-tet, or whatever?”

“I used to,” Silvaire says, and puts a hand to the bird skull around her neck, and doesn’t say anything else.

“So, what, did they die or something?” Tillman asks, because that’s what he does best. Pushing people.

Usually Silvaire would push back, and they would snipe at each other for a while, but that’s not what happens this time. Instead, Silvaire gives him a funny look, and bends over to lean her elbows on the pool table, lacing her fingers together in front of her face.

“I had to leave them,” she says, in a tone that invites no further conversation.

Tillman exhales through his nose. “Bummer.”

Silvaire fishes the cue ball from the side pocket, and it occurs to Tillman that somewhere under the smiles and jokes and flashy gun tricks, she’s lonely. He couldn’t see it before, or maybe he ignored it, but at least now he can feel even better about the fact that he drags her out for drinks every Monday.

“I’ll find another,” she says. “Maybe. If it’s right. Ka is a wheel.”

“Sure,” Tillman says, because he doesn’t know what the fuck that means.

Silvaire puts the cue ball back on the table, and sinks another two balls in the corner pocket. Fucking gunslingers.

*

It happens fast, and without warning.

The Lovers are at bat, and Silvaire is barely paying attention, mostly focused on the Crabs fielding ball after ball, diligently making the other team work for a victory if they want it. She sees an umpire near first, turning to argue with Tillman, hears him raise his voice, and -

He’s gone.

The diamond is silent. The Crabs look around at one another as if coming out of a dream.

Silvaire remembers every time a fellow gunslinger was cut down in battle - struck by a bullet in the middle of a joke, silently dragged from their horse. She remembers walking through a door and leaving her ka-tet behind, leaving not even a pile of ashes for them to mourn, and her heart aches for the Crabs. She can’t make herself look at the scorch mark near the base that used to be Tillman, she _won’t_ look, but she’s on her feet and making her way towards the diamond anyway, because someone has to play, someone has to finish this for him.

She joins the Crabs on the field without a word to anyone, her gun heavy at her hip. Kennedy nods to her, and it’s all the acknowledgement she needs.

When the time comes to bat, she takes Tillman’s, hefts it in her hands. There’s duct tape wound around it where the grand slam nearly cracked it in two. Silvaire could fix that, probably, but she won’t.

She steps to the plate and spits in the dirt. She’s never played blaseball before, never really been the sporting kind in her life, but she knows how to aim, and hitting can’t be that far off from shooting. Silvaire Roadhouse has been many things, and done many more, but let it never be said that she has forgotten the face of her father.

On the mound, the pitcher is winding up. Ashes drift in the wind. Silvaire feels as though she has taken her place in a new family of things. She was drifting, too.

“Ka is a wheel,” she mutters to herself, grins sharply, and swings.

*

She hits a triple homer. Tillman would have liked that.

**Author's Note:**

> *putting my two most niche quarantine interests into a blender* haha fanfic machine go brrrrrrrr
> 
> the grand slam against the spies is a real thing that happened, and i have a screencap of it preserved on my phone.
> 
> you can find me on twitter @corpserevivers!


End file.
